Equality

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Today I was unfortunate enough to receive a leaflet through my door entitled “10 reasons why the government is wrong to redefine marriage”. It came with a bonus leaflet tucked inside called “Stop David Cameron destroying Britain’s families with same sex marriage proposals”.

Now, I freely admit that I am no fan of David Cameron or his government, but some decisions are the right ones no matter who makes them. These leaflets are a sugary sanitised collection of lies and bigotry, and it makes me feel ashamed to be living in the same country as the same people (Coalition for Marriage Limited, and Society for the Protection of Unborn Children) who think it is OK to preach such hate – a thankfully rare occurrence here.

The text contained within is not only offensive to gays, but should also be offensive to anyone who believes in equality and human rights.

This issue is about nothing more than equality. Just as it was wrong to discriminate against other races, and other sexes, it is equally wrong to discriminate against those with alternative sexualities. That this primary-school basic fact of human nature somehow hasn’t made it into the heads of so many people, enough to form a campaign group, is depressing.

It’s especially sickening to see marriage equality portrayed as bad for children because, as the bonus leaflet says, “society will no longer prioritise their main need, which is to be brought up by the people that conceived them”.

Adoptive parents, widows and widowers should be offended and outraged at this comparison. Worse is the line “Marriage won’t be about commitment to bearing and raising children”. Is marriage about that now? Is it illegal for the sterile to get married? Is it illegal for those too old to bear children to get married?

The leaflet continues, often descending into the outright absurd with statements such as “Being male or female will be meaningless, if any combination can get married”. Basic facts of biology would like to disagree with you.

The final point, so often wheeled out by anti-equality campaigners, is that marriage is “an institution” and “traditional” and so we shouldn’t be changing it.

Well I’m sorry but in human history sexism, racism, and brutality to anyone different was “traditional” too, but we got over it. We grew up.

Let’s all grow up.

Traditionally,

Labour are the working mans party, funded by the unions, pioneered the welfare state, care about the working man and maintaining his livelihood.

Tories are the old boys club, focus on what I suppose is known as trickle down economics or, if the rich are doing well, we are all doing well.

Lib Dems, well liberal means allowing a man to be the master of his own fate essentially. As long as you don’t hurt anyone else crack on with it. For this reason they are generally more popular with youth (scoff)

Reality

Labour – Power hungry individuals formed together to run a country the way they want to; under the guise of being the working mans party but generally ignoring this whilst in power. In my opinion the lesser of the evils but just because she’s wearing pretty make up doesn’t mean she’s not going to fuck you.

Tories – Power hungry individuals formed together to run a country the way that their dad is telling them to; under the guise of understanding the way the country works because of all of their heritage. They really don’t care about helping out the little guy it’s all about pumping money into the pockets of their old school friends. Slick, well polished snake oil salesmen who don’t care about you or your opinion. They are the worst of the three

Lib Dems – Never, been in power, never really expecting to be in power often perceived as a wasted vote and have well and truly shot themselves in the foot by pissing off student voters. Having said that this is the place where you will find well meaning politicians who genuinely believe in what they say. Vince Cable really knows his stuff and is an asset to them. They were forced into a hike in tuition fees in exchange for the AV referendum which the Tories then fucked them on by lying about the way it worked to the general populous.

In truth they are all probably as bad as each other, I vote for whoever I have to in order to keep the Tories out.

Now, UKIP are basically daily mail reading, mouth breathing, closet racists who have such a poor grasp of economics they genuinely believe the UK would be better out of the EU. Don’t vote for them, slap anyone you suspect may vote for them.

Plastic_Lampy accurately describing the main political parties in the UK

Installing Steam on Kubuntu: An adventure with screenshots

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I was excited to learn that Steam was available on Linux – I was slightly less excited to discover that it was only available for Ubuntu. Oh well, it’s a start.

I run Kubuntu, the version of Ubuntu that uses KDE instead of Gnome or Unity, because I prefer a real desktop environment and not a toy. But underneath it’s still Ubuntu with the same repositories, so I assumed that it would be easy to find.
Continue reading →

iMovie AVCHD interlacing

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A quick post to vent my frustration about how iMovie (11) deals with interlaced video.

Most modern HD video cameras record interlaced video, specifically 1080i. This is a somewhat strange format that records every other line in a frame. Your TV is supposed to combine the missing lines from adjacent frames to construct the full picture.

This worked well in the days of CRT “tube” televisions, but it’s not very well suited to modern LCD screens. So “deinterlacing” had to be invented, which reconstructs the missing lines before being sent to your screen.

iMovie doesn’t bother doing this. It just throws away every other frame, and stretches out the remaining lines to fill in the gaps. This is a very cheap and lazy way of deinterlacing video that results in a maximum resolution of 1920×540 – not 1080.

Horrible jaggy line made by iMovie throwing away lines

Horrible jaggy line made by iMovie throwing away lines

What’s especially frustrating is that iMovie does this for any AVCHD format video, even if the source video isn’t interlaced to begin with. It just blindly destroys half the pixels in your video.

To prove this, I re-wrapped a non-interlaced AVCHD file into a standard MP4 header and imported it into iMovie. This time, iMovie did not attempt to do any deinterlacing, and the quality remained high.

Nice smooth lines with no deinterlacing

Nice smooth lines with no deinterlacing

Sadly, if your camera shoots interlaced video, as most do, there really isn’t much you can do about this. But if your camera shoots progressive video, which is increasingly common in high-end cameras, you may want to consider what iMovie (or any other video editing software) is doing to your video.

Link

24/192 Music Downloads …and why they make no sense

Here’s the short explanation: CD-quality audio has enough dynamic range to record the difference in volume between a sound-proofed room and a pneumatic drill, and a sample rate high enough to records frequencies we cannot hear.

Audiophiles often claim that higher frequencies are important because we can hear the harmonics, and indeed we can – the harmonics are audible as distortion sprayed across the audible spectrum. Higher sample rates are actually worse.

So unless you have more than two ears and are really into surround-sound, you can safely enjoy your CDs forever.